I tease because I love!
That said, here are some things that boggle my brain to a comedic crossness:

Vos only speaks Cyber-Latin. This makes less sense the more you think about it. Transformers have zero difficulty in picking up the languages of other species whose planets they trample over. They can be taught complicated concepts before birth with varying but mostly practical success. Things like the Galactic Council exist which suggest that the problems of xenolinguistics are long since solved. That said, they do have some ancient languages which are so obscure or weird that they are no longer considered worth learning.

Either Vos has spent the last four million years as part of a ruthless military sub-civilisation that tolerated him being a big stick-in-the-mud who willfully refuses to understand the operating language or he has recently reconfigured his robotic brain to do so because, as we know, the Decepticon Justice Division are a bunch of Hot Topic poseurs.

But wait, aren't the Decepticons militant atheists? Doesn't Tarn consider a mental illness with a religious affectation to be worthy of a death sentence? Yet he is quite cheerful about his mate only speaking in 'The Primal Vernacular.' We could take 'primal' to be literal here and for it just to mean 'The First Language' but I can't help but think that there's a religious connotation there. At the very least, it means that Vos hasn't read 'Beyond Peace,' can't fill out his personal assessment papers properly and that anybody with access to The Decepticon Internet would be able to download his weird language and understand him with no problem.

My guess is that 'The Primal Vernacular' is gibberish and that Tarn is in on the joke.

Cyclonus is a real-estate millionaire. This one is clearly a throwaway joke and possibly an outright fabrication by Swerve or whoever brought it up. However, he handles bar tabs and damages with ease, which is surprising as he was until recently a penniless zombie monster.
Cyclonus, we're told, has a vast personal fortune from 'Helexian real estate' or similar. Presumably this is because, as a well-connected samurai/knight/Mrs. Havisham guy, Cyclonus used to own lots of land that has since become valuable. He might have sold some of that land to have some liquid capital to take with him on The Lost Light. Unless he kept the money in a bank account for twelve million years, accruing compound interest?

But how does that any part of that work? It doesn't even make sense as a joke because why would anyone from Cybertron even think of things in terms of real estate? They destroyed the atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetophere of their planet thousands of years after they'd blown the surface to smithereens in a gigantic war. How could private property exist? And then there's the thing how Cybertron was completely reformatted in recent history - the very same reformat that led Cyclonus to leave the planet in despair.

Rich despair.

Anyone want to help me with these deep, eternal puzzles?

Red Dave Prime

2015-04-27, 10:23 AM

Always thought the cyclonus thing was a play on that episode / chapter of red dwarf where lister turns out to be massively wealthy because of interest on a tiny amount of cash over a long time being frozen.

As for vos, I don't know. Maybe some cybertronians have the equivalent of learning difficulties ( in the way modern pcs cant run older programs).

Terome

2015-04-27, 02:45 PM

Yeah, it's definitely a play on the old accumulated interest gag. But that just leads to further questions about Cybertron's economy!

I like that incompatibility fix for Vos - reminds me of Roche's solution to why Kup would be particularly 'old' - he's just behind on his updates.
Tarn is vaguely paternal towards him. That would work for a learning difficulties situation.

Warcry

2015-04-27, 05:03 PM

Either Vos has spent the last four million years as part of a ruthless military sub-civilisation that tolerated him being a big stick-in-the-mud who willfully refuses to understand the operating language or he has recently reconfigured his robotic brain to do so because, as we know, the Decepticon Justice Division are a bunch of Hot Topic poseurs.
Huh. It's been a while since I reread their intro issues but I never got the impression with Vos that he couldn't understand or read any of the modern languages that the Transformers use to communicate, just that he didn't speak it. Because if he couldn't understand the orders his commanders shouted in the heat of battle, he would have been so utterly useless that he'd never have gotten anywhere near being promoted to the DJD. So basically he's just being a dick to mess with people.

Though I'm not sure how well that works really, for exactly the same reasons that you underlined -- surely everyone would know that Vos can understand them, and everyone who deals with Vos should just be able to download the Primal Vernacular Language Pack from the DeceptInternet and immediately know what he's saying.

But how does that any part of that work? It doesn't even make sense as a joke because why would anyone from Cybertron even think of things in terms of real estate? They destroyed the atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetophere of their planet thousands of years after they'd blown the surface to smithereens in a gigantic war. How could private property exist? And then there's the thing how Cybertron was completely reformatted in recent history - the very same reformat that led Cyclonus to leave the planet in despair.
This one is completely nonsensical to me too. Whatever lands or territories he may have owned back in the day, surely they would have passed to whatever heirs or next-of-kin or whatever the heck Transformers have? I mean, land titles usually aren't kept in the name of people who've been legally dead for four million years.

Also Helix doesn't even exist anymore. After the reformatting, it's just an empty wasteland like the whole rest of Cybertron, like you say.

But by the same token, homeless-junkie-turned-religious-fanatic Drift was apparently a billionaire so who knows? The Cybertronian economy is obviously all kinds of screwed up.

inflatable dalek

2015-04-27, 07:52 PM

Cybertronians have insanely long lifespans and it's not as if Cyclonus is the only one to go missing for millions of years. Time wise it's as if you didn't get in touch with your bank for a decade, the account wouldn't be shut down in that length of time.

Warcry

2015-04-27, 08:31 PM

Right, but it's not as if he just wandered off one day and nobody knew what happened. The disappearance of the original Ark and Nova Prime was a formative event in the entire planet's history. There would have been extensive searches, enough to satisfy the senate and other government branches that they were definitely gone for good. For a real-life example, it's only been a year or so but if someone who was on the passenger list of that Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared without a trace over the Pacific magically reappeared tomorrow I'm sure they wouldn't find their assets just waiting for them. And Cyclonus is more like Amelia Earhart just reappearing out of nowhere a lifetime or more after she disappeared.

Also, with Cybertron's entire economy being destroyed I can't imagine any banks or other companies he did business with still exist in any way, shape or form and their records surely would have been destroyed by the war. The same goes for any Nova-era property registries that would prove that he actually had title to any land.

(We are totally over-analyzing this.)

inflatable dalek

2015-04-28, 06:08 AM

True- but if one of the bodies of those plane victims was found in twenty years time they'd still be dead, shuffling off this mortal coil is often a temporary state for Transformers (is this analogy too morbid?).

Presumably their legal books- or rather that of whatever world/s Cyclonus had his holdings on because, as you say Cybertron's property ladder would have been well and truly shattered- would make allowances for very lengthy absences and even seeming death. It's likely Cyclonus would have put provisos for how long to keep up assets going in the event of him seeming to vanish on his unprecedented mission.

Terome

2015-04-28, 11:23 AM

Hopefully that one throw-away line is set up for the next massive arc - the tragic story of Cyclonus' lonely accounts manager who kept all his affairs in order while he was a zombie in the Dead Universe who was let go without so much as a by-your-leave or handshake.

He kills Tailgate but not really.

Unicron

2015-04-28, 03:27 PM

Hopefully that one throw-away line is set up for the next massive arc - the tragic story of Cyclonus' lonely accounts manager who kept all his affairs in order while he was a zombie in the Dead Universe who was let go without so much as a by-your-leave or handshake.

He kills Tailgate but not really.

Not the next arc, but in 5 years when Barber goes on another continuity fixing binge. It'll be MTMTE's version of the Spotlight: Mirage callback